Thank you, Chair.
I want to comment briefly on the material we provided you. We provided four pieces.
The first piece is some detailed information on how we derived our projections. We're happy to answer any questions on that. I want to comment that we thought this was a significant amount of detail, more than is usually provided for measures that go through the budget process or other EI measures.
The second piece, as requested, was on the explanation of the sharing of compassionate care benefits.
The third piece was on the analysis of gender. This was a fairly lengthy piece, which provides quite a bit of detail on it. I want to apologize for its arriving a little late. That is because it is such a large piece that it took us quite a while to have it translated and all formatted.
The last piece is a clarification of the role of the Office of the Chief Actuary and the chief actuary for the EI commission.
Last time, there was a lot of confusion because we used the term “chief actuary”, and sometimes the committee and witnesses were talking about different people. We have the Office of the Chief Actuary, which works for OSFI, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, and is responsible for the actuarial valuations for CPP, for OAS, and for the Canada student loans program. They are not responsible for the EI program. For that, we have a chief actuary who provides advice. So we brought with us Luc Taillon.
I want to clarify that Luc has two roles. One is that he is the chief actuary for the EI program, and his team provides support for the EI commission in determining the premium rate for any given year. That is only part of his job; it's where he spends roughly one-quarter of his time. Most of his time is spent as a member of the skills employment branch, which I head. There he runs the actuarial and geomatics group, and occasionally he is pulled in to provide support in the development of measures. Such was the case with the self-employment measure.
Usually he is not part of that. When we look at the recent initiatives that HRSDC has developed—the additional five weeks, the Canada transition assistance initiative, the work sharing, the recent increase to 20 weeks for long-tenured workers—he isn't involved. The only reason we involved him this time around was that the measure is quite complex, and we thought it was a prudent practice to have that extra layer of rigour when it came to this assessment. Other than that, the policy was developed in the same way as it always is.
I hope that is helpful. We are pleased to answer any questions.